A huge number of bots work on the internet every day and they visit sites for various purposes. Some are useful — search engine bots index sites, monitoring bots check uptime. Others are malicious — used for content theft, price scraping, account hijacking or spam distribution. A bot protection system must be able to distinguish good and bad bots and only block malicious ones while allowing useful ones.
How bots harm sites
Bad bots cause various damages to sites. First they consume server resources and the site slows down for real users. Second by copying content and price information they give an advantage to competitors. Third brute force bots try to hack accounts. Fourth form auto-filling bots send spam and ruin statistics. For e-commerce sites it is especially a problem — fast bots can order available goods and lock up inventory.
Cloudflare Bot Management
Cloudflare Bot Management is one of the most mature anti-bot solutions. Using machine learning algorithms it analyzes each visitor and calculates the probability of being a bot. Browser features, keystroke patterns, mouse movements and network characteristics are considered. Good bots — Googlebot, Bingbot — are automatically detected and let through. Malicious ones are blocked or asked to pass CAPTCHA. The Cloudflare dashboard has bot traffic statistics and a list of detected threats.
Fingerprinting and behavioral analysis
Bot fingerprinting allows identifying each user by collecting unique browser and device characteristics. Many parameters are collected — canvas, WebGL, audio context, font list — to create a unique fingerprint. Real user fingerprints are diverse but bots often have the same ones. Behavioral analysis tracks user actions on the page — how the mouse moves, how keys are pressed, how long the page is viewed. These signals are effective for distinguishing human and bot.
Robots.txt and Honeypot methods
The robots.txt file is used to tell honest bots the site rules but bad bots ignore it. Honeypot is hidden fields and pages that only bots use. For example an invisible form field is added and if it is filled — it is a bot. A hidden link can be placed and anyone who visits it is considered a bot. These methods are simple but effective especially against primitive bots.
Sayt.uz practice
Sayt.uz uses Cloudflare Bot Management together with its own internal bot detection system. Honeypot fields are automatically added to form pages. Behavioral analysis is activated on login and payment pages — if the action scheme is suspicious additional verification is requested. Clients can see in the cabinet how many bots are blocked per day and which pages are targeted. Good bots — search engines and monitoring — are automatically added to the whitelist with full access.